About Me

Gregg Walker is a Harlem Resident and 1997 graduate of Yale Law School who worked as an investment banker for 9 years and was the Vice President of Strategy and Mergers & Acquisitions at Viacom for 3 years. Gregg served as the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Sony from 2009 to 2016, and he launched his own private investing firm in July 2016 (www.gawalker.co). Gregg was chosen in 2010 by Crain's as one of NYC's 40 Under 40 Rising Stars (http://mycrains.crainsnewyork.com/40under40/profiles/2010/gregg-walker). Gregg is a Deacon at Abyssinian Baptist Church and served as the chairman of the Board of the Harlem YMCA. He has served on the Boards of movie studio MGM and music publishing companies Sony/ATV and EMI Music Publishing. He is also a Board member of Harlem RBI and Derek Jeter's Turn 2 Foundation. He is a former Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a representative of the US at the 2002 Young Leaders Conference of the American Council on Germany. Gregg is also a member of many other foundations and community organizations.

Monday, June 6, 2011

NYPD Sets New Stop-and-Frisk Record

The NYPD stopped more people in the first three months of 2011 than in any three-month period ever recorded. Given the grotesque level of racial discrimination exhibited by the NYPD in their stop-and-frisk activity, ending that activity must be our focus.

Stop-and-Frisk and Manhattan Viewpoint

More than any other issue we have highlighted, we have focused on Mayor Bloomberg's and the NYPD's obsession with stopping innocent people of color in our city.

The Mayor and the NYPD continue to increase their racist tactics and intensify their abuse of communities of color, and non-racist people must stand up and oppose these abuses. If the Mayor will not end these practices, we must demand that the Mayor resign. No police force in our country should be permitted to abuse its citizens of color with such ferocious and racist dedication. We, as residents of the greatest city on our planet, must put an end to it.

A Disgusting New Record

We learned last week that the Mayor and the NYPD have now set a disgusting new record.

Recent investigations into the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy, which is ostensibly to find firearms but doesn't usually work out that way, show that not only are the searches illegal in many cases, but they overwhelmingly target men of color in poor areas. These stops result in tens of thousands of arrests every year for small-scale weed possession, some of which would be thrown out if a judge ever saw them. But because most people don't know their rights, the cycle spins on: through the end of March, the NYPD has 183,326 stop-and-frisks on record this year, the highest number since they started keeping track in 2004. Of those, 11,925 people were arrested and 10,292 were issued tickets. Unsurprisingly, a majority of those stopped were black.

There have been 183,326 stop-and-frisk encounters recorded from January through March in NYC, according to NYPD records obtained by the NYCLU. About 88 percent of those stops resulted in neither an arrest nor a summons, and it probably won't surprise you that about 84 percent of those stopped by police were black or Latino. (In 2010, only about 9 percent of people stopped were white.) So far, stop-and-frisk incidents are up 22 percent over the same time period last year . . .

Critics of stop-and-frisk point out that suspect descriptions make up only a small percentage of the reasons officers list for making stops. Over the first quarter of this year, suspect descriptions accounted for just under 15% of the reason stops were made, according to NYPD statistics.

Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said, the stop and frisk numbers “are going in the absolutely wrong direction.”

“Stop and frisk has a place in law enforcement but the abuse of this tactic to target absolutely innocent people is bad for all New Yorkers,” she said. “This practice seriously undermines the quality of life for people of color in New York City, particularly in the poorest, most vulnerable neighborhoods.”